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Should Microdata Become a W3C Standard?

Manu Sporny recently voiced his personal objection to the W3C microdata candidate recommendation. He writes, "The HTML Working Group at the W3C is currently trying to decide if they should transition the Microdata specification to the next stage in the standardization process. There has been a call for consensus to transition the spec to the Candidate Recommendation stage. From a standards perspective, this is a huge mistake and sends the wrong signal to Web developers everywhere. The problem is that we already have a set of specifications that are official W3C recommendations that do what Microdata does and more. RDFa 1.1 became an official W3C Recommendation last summer."

He opines, "Here’s the problem in a nutshell: The W3C is thinking of ratifying two completely different specifications that accomplish the same thing in basically the same way. The functionality of RDFa, which is already a W3C Recommendation, overlaps Microdata by an embarrassingly large margin. In fact, RDFa Lite 1.1 was developed as a plug-in replacement for Microdata. The full version of RDFa can also do a number of things that Microdata cannot, such as datatyping, associating more than one type per object, embed-ability in languages other than HTML, ability to easily publish and mix vocabularies, etc."